Important to remember..................

Remember: Just because you're paranoid.....

.............doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Bacon brilliantly prefigured, by more than three centuries, modern behavioral psychology's notion that humans have a proclivity to "suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds."  Man is little more than a pattern-seeking primate, with an unerring ability to see connections and suspect conspiracies where none exist.

-William J. Berstein, The Birth of Plenty:  How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created

Just because you're paranoid............

.........doesn't mean that they're not out to get you:

 The second is size is associated with success, success is associated with hubris, and hubris is the beginning of the end of success. Some of the most enduring animals aren’t apex predators, but they’re very good at evasion, camouflage, and armor. They’re paranoid. I always come back to the time Charlie Rose asked Michael Moritz how Sequoia Capital has thrived for three decades, and he said, “We’ve always been afraid of going out of business.” Paranoia in the face of success is extremely hard but in hindsight it’s the closest thing to a secret weapon that exists.

-Morgan Housel, from this blog post

Just because you’re paranoid.....................

..........................doesn’t mean the algorithms aren’t out to get you.

Ouch............................

     Besides insecurity, the Famine imbued those who fled it to come to America with a bone-deep distrust of the free-market economy and its justifying doctrine.  Ireland's British rulers had not caused the Famine, but, as a consequence of their laissez-faire ideology, they did little to relieve the distress it brought, fearing that the moral fiber of the eight million starving Irish would be destroyed if Her Majesty's government bestirred itself to feed them.  The idea was to let them die morally intact, so to speak.

-Jack Beatty,   The Rascal King:  The Life And Times Of James Michael Curley

Opening paragraphs........................

     I'm often credited with the motto, "Only the paranoid survive."  I have no idea when I first said this, but the fact remains that, when it comes to business, I believe in the value of paranoia.  Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.  The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left.  I believe that the prime responsibility of a manager is to guard constantly against other people's attacks and to inculcate this guardian attitude in the people under his or her management.

-Andrew S. Grove,  Only The Paranoid Survive:  How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company and Career

Like the man said........................

..............................just because you are paranoid doesn't mean that they are not out to get you.

Fun with conspiracies...............

"History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy”
-Zbigniew Brzeziński

“In a world of full of manipulation, half-truths and lies, the conspiracy theory is often a safer bet than the official story.” 
-Gary Hopkins

"The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening.   Nobody is in control.   The world is rudderless...” 
-Alan Moore

“Conspiracy theory is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world.” 
-Roger Cohen

“Culture, religion, and education, are conspiracies to standardize worldviews.” 
-Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Why do we love the idea that people might be secretly working together to control and organise the world? Because we don't like to face the fact that our world runs on a combination of chaos, incompetence and confusion.” 
-Jonathan Cainer

“The world is big conspiracy to make you happy.” 
-Santosh Kalwar

“Sometimes you just gotta wear the tinfoil hat.” 
-Gary Hopkins

cartoon via